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Progressives and Hypocrisy: A Love Affair

I don’t want to shock our readers but, occasionally, liberals can be inconsistent. They can be, if one dares use the term, hypocritical. This latest example came to my attention as I was researching a recent piece on the case the Supreme Court is hearing with regards to unions.

The issue, in short, is this: there are those who do not want to be forced to pay union dues, while the unions say they must. The union rationale is that a worker benefits from union negotiated wages and conditions, so it’s only right that he or she pay the dues.

The unions call this, in true liberal euphemistic fashion, the “fair share provision.” It is thought that, should dues paying become optional, there would be a disproportionate financial burden on those who choose to pay union dues. But apparently, progressive objection to subsidizing the benefits of others doesn’t translate to other situations.

Take Obamacare, for example. How does this “fairness” apply to that darling of the left? On the surface, it translates perfectly. Everyone is forced to pay for something they may or may not want, in order to finance the benefits of everyone else. This is another case of fairness above choice because our liberal overlords have decided that it is in our best interest. That, however, is as far as the correlation goes because, in reality, everyone does not pay in.

Obamacare waivers are given out like Mardi Gras beads to those who most enthusiastically flash their support in public. Ironically, this includes unions- the very groups that believe everyone should chip in for the greater good have managed to get out of doing exactly that.

Should the unions wish to be ideologically consistent, I have a a suggestion. Perhaps they should take a page from Obamacare and give waivers to those who actually love their union (and would choose to pay dues), thus only collecting dues from those who have no wish to join. Easy peasy.

As many have pointed out, there is an element in Islam that views lying as a virtue blessed by Allah. It comes into play when lies are told to defend Islam from the infidels. As a service to Allah, it is a virtue to deceive the enemies of Allah and his faithful followers. The Left is founded on dogma that is similar, but with a more universal application. First there either is no God, or God is an "ideal" of undefined nature and determining impact, (an indifferent god). Either leaves the determination of morality in the hands of human beings. Each human being develops their own "moral code". But such individual moralities will tend to be Narcissistically self-serving. So superior to individual moral codes are collective, social, moral codes. Societies are 4th dimensional, involving time as well as the first 3 dimensions. Societies develop moral codes that evolve over time. But in that evolution, if not in their inception, social moral codes can become distorted. Distorted or not, social moral codes are likely to create conflicts with individual moral codes. There may also be divisions within a society in which one faction embraces a moral code in conflict with another. The means to resolve such conflicts is "authority". A moral code is assumed to have greater authority than all others. But how is that superior moral code determined? God is one way. Tradition another. A worldly authority, like a king can provide the authority. But part of what created the Left and distinguishes it is that it views all of these as unreliable sources of a superior moral code. In democracy the Left views the ultimate source of a moral code to be the leadership of the society. They derive that authority by election by the majority of the people and so, in leadership, the ultimate worldly determinant of morality is clear. It is democratically elected leadership. But what happen if tricks and cheats are used to determine that leadership? Then the leadership is not really democratically elected, it is elected by tricks or cheats. So a means to determine whether a leadership was democratically elected or not is needed. Democracy is the rule of the people. Therefore a sign that a leadership is or is not democratically elected is whether or not they serve the people as indicated by things they do for the people using their power. The people may be deceived about who is really dedicated to serving their needs, but leadership's actions that either increase, maintain or diminish leadership's benefits to the people indicate whether leadership is or is not truly democratically elected. True leaders of the people would be put at a disadvantage if the enemies of the people were able to use trickery to deceive the people and the true leaders of the people were not. Therefore the true leaders of the people must also be allowed to deceive the people to "even the playing field". The difference is that false leaders deceive the people in order to work against the people's true interests, while true leaders deceive the people so they can act in the interest of the people. Their means may be the same, but their ends are diametrically opposite. And how do you know that a candidate for leadership is a true leader? From their history of seeking to benefit the people ... or otherwise. And this can be verified by the endorsement of other leaders who are known to work for the people's interests. So ... if you are understood to be one who works for the people's interests it is okay if you lie, because the deeper truth is that you are a true servant/leader of the people. Likewise, if you are not a true servant/leader of the people, it does not matter if you are telling the truth because all of your supposed "truths" are really just means of deceiving the people. It matters little what is said. The Left is true and all else a lie and even lies from the Left are a service to the greater truth. There is not, and must not be, any authority greater than this. And anyone seeking to establish an authority greater than this is an enemy of the people. George Orwell wrote about this in '1984'. The truth is what the state says it is. If it says four is five, then in truth, four is five.

Professional licensure is a too-often ignored way for government to protect private monopolies, squash, competition, keep prices high, and reduce consumer choice. I’ve written extensively about the issue before, because the practice of licensure can be very harmful to honest citizens seeking to better themselves through gainful employment, and like all government regulations, it hits the poorest and least educated citizens hardest.

Enrollees in several states face a severe lack of options in physician networks for plans offered on the ObamaCare exchanges, according to a brief released on Monday by the Leonard David Institute of Health Economics and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Limited physician networks is a part of the health insurance industry's effort to mitigate mandates in the so-called Affordable Care Act that have increased costs.

Health insurance companies are seeking large premium increases for many health plans available on the ObamaCare exchanges. The proposed increases vary by state, but the average ranges from 23 percent in Illinois to 36 percent in Tennessee to 54 percent in Minnesota.

As ObamaCare continues to increase health care costs and wreak havoc upon the infrastructure of our health care system, physicians are at the front lines watching the damage first-hand. It is more important than ever that medical professionals who recognize the damage that government control is doing to their profession speak up and be among the loudest voices calling for reforms that re-center the practice of medicine where it belongs – at the relationship between individual doctors and patients.

When the so-called "public option" single-payer healthcare program was scrapped during the legislative "debate" over ObamaCare in 2009, lawmakers working on the bill created the Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan Program as a compromise. The non-profit co-op program is meant to compete with private, for-profit health insurance plans in the individual and small group markets. The 2010 healthcare law provided $3.4 billion in start-up funding to help get the program off the ground.

Sometimes a man’s just got to take a stand. Rand Paul did it his 13-hour filibuster on drone strikes, Ted Cruz did it in his 21-hour floor speech to defund ObamaCare, and now Mike Lee is invoking an obscure Senate procedure rule to completely repeal everyone’s least favorite health care law.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on Thursday showing that undercover consumers were allowed to re-enroll in health plans on the federal ObamaCare Exchange. The bogus enrollees had outstanding document issues that should have prevented them from obtaining subsidies for coverage.

More Americans paid ObamaCare's individual mandate tax for 2014 than previously estimated, according to a new report from the Internal Revenue Service's National Taxpayer Advocate. In January, the Treasury Department projected that up to 6 million households would be subject to the tax because they did not purchase a government-approved health insurance plan.